RESOURCES

CASHE has access to the following resources that can be used to plan studies and generate preliminary data for grant proposals.

Health Insurance Claims Databases

    • MarketScan®: CASHE holds a renewable license for the MarketScan® Commercial Insurance Claims Database that allows the data to be used by Penn State researchers, students, and other collaborators.
    • Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS): Using a CMS Virtual Resource Data Center (VRDC) seat, CASHE has access to administrative claims data for the Medicare and Medicaid programs.

Other Databases

    • Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project: Nationwide Inpatient Sample (HCUP NIS): HCUP NIS is a unique and powerful hospital discharge database developed as part of HCUP. NIS can be used to identify, track and analyze national trends in healthcare utilization, access, charges, outcomes and quality.
    • Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS): MEPS is a set of large-scale surveys of families and individuals, their medical providers (doctors, hospitals, pharmacies and so on) and employers across the United States. MEPS has two major components: the Household Component and the Insurance Component.
    • National Surgical Quality Improvement Program (NSQIP): NSQIP was developed by the American College of Surgeons (ACS). The data provide in-depth and insightful analysis thus assisting surgeons and hospitals better understand their quality of care compared to similar hospitals with similar patients.
    • Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council (PHC4): PHC4 is an independent Pennsylvania state agency that collects over 4.5 million inpatient hospital discharge and ambulatory/outpatient procedure records each year from hospitals and freestanding ambulatory surgery centers in Pennsylvania.
    • Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER): Sponsored by the National Cancer Institute (NCI), SEER provides information on cancer statistics in an effort to reduce the burden of cancer among the U.S. population.
    • SEER-Medicare: The SEER-Medicare database is sponsored by the National Cancer Institute (NCI). It contains combined clinical information from population-based cancer registries with enrollment and claims information from the Medicare program.
    • University HealthSystem Consortium (UHC): UHC is an alliance of 118 academic medical centers and 299 of their affiliated hospitals representing the nation’s leading academic medical centers. UHC has databases that provide comparative data in clinical, operational, financial, patient safety, practice management and other supply chain areas.

Contact us for more information.